Oral Presentation for "Uncovering the scale: On the interaction between the semantics of roots and functional structure"

This talk presents a hypothesis concerning those semantic aspects of roots which are visible to functional structure and supports the hypothesis by contrasting the behavior or degree achievement verbs with a class of verbs represented by 'cover'. It is shown that the stative roots at the core of both classes interact differently with functional structure and this difference is attributed to scalar structure associated with degree achievements but lacking from 'cover' verbs.